A letter to students considering a PhD

Niraj Lal is one of our Top 5 Under 40 scientists. He is investigating how to make solar cells more efficient using nanophotonics. Nij is beginning to supervise PhD candidates. He is concerned that the number of graduating PhDs far outweighs the jobs available. In his letter Nij urges potential students to seriously consider the employment market and all options for PhD graduates.

Transcript

Niraj Lal: Well, congratulations on finishing your first degree. Getting a university degree isn't easy. It's probably even harder now with the pressures of part-time work, tenuous housing and future massive student debts. Being smart, you are likely aware of the option to study for a PhD. Maybe your honours supervisor has approached you about further study, or you've chatted with tutors, demonstrators and academics in your department. If you graduate with first-class honours, many universities around Australia will guarantee you a scholarship.

A PhD is worth considering. Pushing the boundaries of human knowledge is fun. You develop serious skills in problem solving and get to call yourself doctor. But, you should go forward with eyes open and with a full awareness of the options ahead.

I'm writing this letter as a youngish academic beginning to supervise PhD students for the first time. It's ace. PhD students for academics are like free worker bees, busily making the honey of academic publications. It's almost always in our interest to have more PhDs in the lab. Academics want to dish out scholarships like banks do credit cards. But I'm not sure that potential PhD students in Australia are fully informed of the road ahead. With this letter, I hope to address any imbalance.

In 1948, there were no Australian PhDs. In 1949 there were three. Now we produce more than 7,000 each year. And that's only Australia. The USA is graduating 49,000 PhDs per year. China, more than 50,000, and India aims to churn out 20,000 PhDs each year in just a few years' time.

A PhD degree isn't as exceptional a qualification as it once was. I choose the word 'exceptional' carefully. I grew up reading the childhood classic Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. In it, Laura grows up to complete year seven and become a schoolteacher herself, something celebrated by the Ingalls family. Teaching was a guarantee of secure, meaningful, well paid employment. That was in 1800. Today, around 7% of the world has an undergraduate university degree. Which is great, but it means that higher levels of education aren't an exception, which is a fantastic thing for the world.

One consequence is that undergraduate university qualifications are now a prerequisite for jobs across many sectors. Perhaps one day postgraduate qualifications will be a prerequisite. Or will they? A PhD usually takes between 3 to 4 years, often during some of the most energetic years of life and often on a low wage. There will always be pressure for higher qualifications, but at some point the marketplace will start selecting for four years of work experience instead of a highly specialised higher degree by research, if it isn't doing so already.

To an honours student considering a PhD, one potential career path is academia. So let's look at the history of academic employment in Australia. Undergraduate student numbers have doubled since 1989. PhD graduations have quadrupled. But the number of full-time academic staff employed in Australia has increased by only 20%.

A study of higher education outcomes in the UK found that just under 0.5%, that is less than a one in 200 of PhD graduates, become a full-time professor in a university. If you are doing a PhD for the money, then that doesn't always add up either. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found those with a PhD earn on average $100 a week less than those with a professional degree. It's still on average more than a bachelor, masters or no degree at all, but the cash isn't massive. And if you follow the academic route, you are likely to be on short term contracts, as I'm on, until you are in your mid-30s, if you are one of the lucky ones.

The Australian Academy of Science is aware of this. In a recent piece in The Conversation, Professors Les Field and Andrew Holmes point out that there is work and life outside of universities for PhD graduates. And there is. There are initiatives like Teach for Australia, and rewarding opportunities in industry and government and communications and consulting. And of course plenty of opportunities in other countries.

But perhaps honours students should be questioning more whether they want to spend three years doing a PhD in the first place. You've got to follow your passions, and fortune really does favour the brave. If research is what makes you tick then there is no option but to follow it. A PhD can be fun, exciting, interesting and fulfilling. But you need to know the stats and you need to know the likely outcomes.

Robyn Williams: Niraj Lal from Monash, one of our Five Under-40 scientists. And more on PhDs and careers from Dr Alan Finkel next week. There was also an outspoken piece by Jillian Segal on that topic in The Australian Financial Review on Thursday. She is deputy chancellor of the University of New South Wales.

Guests

Niraj Lal

Research Fellow in the Renewable Energy LaboratoryMonash UniversityMelbourne VIC

Further Information

Credits

Comments (2)

Chris :

15 Aug 2016 4:19:39pm

A side-effect is that it makes the university environment deleteriously competitive. I worked in biomedical engineernig for 15 years after my PhD but in the end I just couldn't stand the academic politics any more (as we know, "they fight so much because the stakes are so low"). I found nearly everyone was paranoid and petty-minded, and many people were more concerned with keeping their jobs by backstabbing others than actually doing science!